Building Patience Takes Patience…

“It takes time”, that’s what they all say, especially to a most impatient person like me. Telling me to “have patience” is like telling a bird not to fly. It’s suffocating when things don’t work out or when they take a lot of time.

I am at a stage of life where I need to know what the fuck all this is about. Where I need to know where I should invest my mind to live a happy life. Where I need to know what I actually like. Where I need to know what I should be doing to create a beautiful legacy, to achieve success, so to speak.

But I always say I need to know, as if there’s an answer just waiting for me to find it. This part of my life is filled with anxiety, agitation, and lack of confidence. These are my twenties, where I assume I need to know, where I want to have answers to move forward!

You are moving too fast

So, to find the answers, I ask a lot of questions, to myself and to others. “It takes time,” they all say. I always feel sad because I don’t like that answer. Who likes waiting?

The field of study I am currently working in is called machine learning – making machines think. AI, a popular name for this field, is booming like crazy. There’s always something happening here, each week, each day, each hour! Some new concept, some new model which changes the entire direction of the field. So much so that the amount of papers worth reading takes more time than 24 hours in a day. It’s impossible to keep up, even for the big-brain scientists. I, although not a beginner in the field, want to understand it all at once! Even though I know it is not possible to know everything at once, I still fall for the FOMO. It’s too much, I need to calm the fuck down. I need to remind myself to breath.

Do you want to know?

I was having this anxiety about not being able to follow what has been happening in this field. I knew I am not the only one; many feel the same way. But still, you can’t tackle this anxiety with rationality (sometimes). So I asked my friend, who has been inside this research industry for more than a decade and has a ton more experience than me.

“Ask yourself, do you want to know?” he said. Why should I care about things I don’t really need to understand? If I don’t have any use for quantum equations in my research of Machine Learning, I don’t have to push myself to crack that complex math open. Curiosity? Yes, I am still curious about quantum mechanics, but curiosity is something which is innate to me. I don’t have to be anxious just to satisfy that curiosity, do I?

How to stay focused?

Sure, I know what I don’t have to do. I don’t have to learn everything. I just need to focus on what I really need. “Focus is saying NO to things!” Steve Jobs said. But that is just half the story. Where should I focus if not everywhere? And how would I know I am not getting into the weeds of complex stuff unnecessarily?

“Make logs of whatever you have done in a day,” he said. It is important to trail blaze. Walking on the path of curiosity is not much different from walking in a dense jungle. You can easily get lost. You think you will be able to gaze at the stars and make sense of direction? Sorry, you can’t; jungle spilling into the sky! It is impossible to find direction all the time; you only get a chance to see the sky once in a while. So to keep the direction, the only thing we can do is to follow the trail. We can notice if our trail is diverting and get back on track. Sometimes it won’t work, sure, but most of the time it will, and that’s enough.

“Things take time”

Research is one thing, it has a lot to do with mind than to body. Making your mind learn things is easier compared to making your body do things, at least I feel that way. Going to the gym for 2 months, you can’t see much of a difference.

It will always take time. Months or even years go by to get any good output out of these things. Forget the gym; try learning piano. Tell me if you can play a non-digitally sounding piece within a few months; you just can’t, no matter how genius you are, your fingers will crumble. It’s impossible not to get frustrated.

What to do? I am impatient; there’s not much I can do about that. So either I would suffer through the process, self-blame myself for not getting results in a few months, live in a guilt, or I can use that trait of mine to make faster progress! (Okay, I am overselling it)

Use Impatience to Your Advantage

I want to learn this piece on piano; I know it’s not possible to learn it in just a few days, even if I practice daily. But this bugs me all the time, making me feel agitated. To solve it, I do a simple mind trick. Usually, I would practice, let’s say, 30 minutes of piano daily. But now I want this so bad, so I will tell myself to practice it for 45 minutes, which is substantially more time than usual. So my mind thinks, hey, at least I am trying. But me being me, even after 45 minutes, I won’t be satisfied with the progress; it’s still not perfect. But now the trick is to tell my mind, hey, you have practiced more than usual; now it’s time to take a break and do other things that need your attention too, like breathing, living a life!

Doing this 45 minutes instead of 30 minutes, which is 50% more, makes the progress faster. I am now able to play that piece which would have taken 2 weeks, but I did it in a week. My “get it done now!” mind has some peace from both progress as well as the music!

This may not be true with everything. Going to the gym 2hrs/day instead of 1hr is not feasible to get faster results. But my intention is to trick my own mind. To convince it that I am putting more efforts than I usually do.

But do I need to move faster? Do I really have to trick my mind?

Does this even matter?

I can be a good researcher; I can have six packs. With enough practice, I can definitely play La Campanella perfectly. But am I seeking perfection? Does it really matter if I don’t achieve those things? Does it really matter if I don’t have those answers?I mean, I am not the person who would take no for an answer, but let’s try.

In my opinion, there are two types of questions: questions which have a definite answer and questions which have probabilistic answers (that’s why I like ML, don’t I?).

How many calories do I need to burn daily to get in shape? How many papers do I need to read to understand that one paper which has been haunting me? How many notes do I need to play to play that piece the way it is meant to sound? It’s all definitive. I know I have to do a certain amount to be perfect. I allow myself to be self-critical and be a perfectionist for these answers. Because there’s no other way around it!

But how many days will it take to get in shape? How many papers will it take to have a novel idea and publish my own research? How many hours of practice will it take to make La Campanella sound fluent? I can never know. I will never know.

Uncertain questions require patience

Life is full of questions that don’t have definitive answers. Will you be a billionaire? Will you marry a person whom you love? What chance is there that your own son won’t stab you? What’s the chance that some dictator won’t drop an atomic bomb on your home tomorrow? Do you have any definitive answers for these?

How do we live without answers then? How can we go out without the certainty that we will see our family in the evening? This baffles me; I am impatient to know these things. But I need to accept it as it is; there are no answers to some questions I simply have to adapt to uncertainty. It’s painful not to know. But I guess this itself takes time; this itself takes a lot of patience to learn… To be more patient.

---

As you can see, this is not a complete thought. This is a journal entry not a blog, creation of my mind, and there’s only one target audience: that’s me from the future. But when I finished writing it, I realized how common these things are. My anxiety, impatience about life is shared by millions. There’s a slight chance that this will trigger few neurons in others. But maybe you have thought much more about this; in that case, please don’t forget to ping me how you deal with this at [email protected]. I am all ears!

---